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Australian virologist Frank Fenner, MD was born in Ballarat, Victoria in 1914. He earned a Doctor of Medicine in 1942 at the University of Adelaide, and from 1940 – 1946 he worked on the malaria parasite in Egypt and Papua New Guinea as an officer in the Australian Army Medical Corps. He subsequ...
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Understanding the evolution of life-threatening viruses like influenza, Ebola and dengue fever, could help us to minimize their impact. New research points the way to a fossil record of viruses that have insinuated themselves into the genomes of insects and other animals, providing clues about t...
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It's a cliché, I know - but a generation of scientists is passing whose like we truly may never see again. Frank Fenner has died in Australia, at the respectable age of 95, days after meeting his first great-grandchild.

And what a passing. Fenner comes from the era when so much was undiscover...
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On episode #108 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent, Alan, Rich, and Saul review the evolution of HIV-1 specific recombinases, and down-regulation of a host microRNA by a viral noncoding R...
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Viruses possess an ability to mutate into strains that can render vaccines useless and become deadlier than their predecessor. But for a team of Texan scientists, this biological danger became a forensic asset that helped prosecutors convict two men accused of infecting close to a dozen women wi...
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At this point, after finding microorganisms that don’t mind extreme temperatures, pressure, aridity and other hardships, we shouldn’t be surprised that bacteria’s dominion over the Earth extends to just about anywhere we look. A new expedition to the Earth’s crust has reached unprecedented depth...
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Researcher Jean-Paul Meijnen has 'trained' bacteria to convert all the main sugars in vegetable, fruit and garden waste efficiently into high-quality environmentally friendly products such as bioplastics. He will be defending his doctoral thesis on this topic, which was carried out in the contex...
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Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago have discovered a protein produced by HIV that keeps infected cells from signaling the immune system that they are harboring the virus and should be killed. These data, which suggest a new target for HIV drugs, were published online Octobe...
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Vincent and Dickson move on to nematodes with a discussion of the pinworm Enterobius vermicularis.

Listeria can pose special challenges for artisan cheesemakers. Many make their cheese right on the farm, where the bad bacteria are right outside the cheese room door. And small producers often lack the safety training and resources available at bigger companies.

The first study to ever explore biological activity in the deepest layer of ocean crust has found bacteria with a remarkable range of capabilities, including eating hydrocarbons and natural gas, and "fixing" or storing carbon.

The research, just published in the journal PLoS One, showed that ...
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Contrary to long-held beliefs, plants and animals have developed remarkably similar mechanisms for detecting microbial invasions. This holds promise for the future treatment of infectious diseases in humans.

It may have been 1 billion years since plants and animals branched apart on the evolu...
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